Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Baseball Up Close

Nick Price

English 1109 10:30 MW20 September 2016

Baseball up Close

It all started when I was 11 years old and I won 4 VIP box seats for a Cincinnati Reds game. I had won the tickets doing a fundraiser at my mom's work during my job shadowing project. There was a raffle that Friday at my mom's work and she wasn't gonna buy a ticket so I did when the person selling them came to her desk for $2. “You’re really gonna buy one” my mom said laughing. “Hey anything can happen” I said.

The drawing for the tickets wasn't until the end of the day at 4:30, it unfortunately was only 10 am so I had a while to wait. The end of the day finally came and we all gathered around the owner as he drew a ticket from a huge bowl. There were probably over 1,000 tickets in that bowl. He pulled the ticket and started to shout out the number. “Okay I matched the first 3 numbers” I thought to myself. Then he read off the last 3 and it was mine. I still remember to this day 867369.

The game was the following Saturday, and the Reds were paying the Milwaukee Brewers. We got the the stadium about 11:30 for a 1pm game. My mom said that since I won the tickets I could take a friend. So I took my friend Michael Ross, one of my good friends with me and my mom and dad. The first thing that I did was go straight to the box and explore it (I had never sat in a box before). It was the best thing ever, you can sit down in the special box seats or you can stay in the box and eat so much food. Pizza, Hot Dogs, cake, steak, peanuts, pretty much anything you could think of. Just when we didn't think it could get any better it did.

“Would you like to meet the players now?” a worker in the box asked us. “We get to meet the players?” asked Michael. He explained to us that it was part of the tickets and that we could go right now to the locker room and meet everyone. So that's just what we did, when we got to the locker room they gave us baseballs for them to be able to sign. We went to each player and got the signature on the same ball. Joey Votto, Jay Bruce, and Scott Rolen. The day was Christmas in July. We did whatever, whenever in the box for the whole day.